The first novel to feature war-damaged Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge, A Test of Wills is the book that brought author Charles Todd into the spotlight. This mystery brilliantly evokes post-World War I Great Britain and introduces readers to one of crime fiction’s most compelling series protagonists. Here the shell-shocked Rutledge struggles to retain his fragile grip on sanity while investigating the death of a popular army colonel, murdered, it appears, by a decorated war hero with ties to the Royal Family. A phenomenal writer, a twisting puzzle, a character-rich re-creation of an extraordinary time and place…it all adds up to one exceptional read
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"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whore-master man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star!"
King Lear (Edmund) Act I, scene ii
William Shakespeare
"A beggar's book outworths a noble's blood”
Henry VIII, Act 1, Scene 1
William Shakespeare
"How well he's read, to reason against reading!"
Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1, Scene1
William Shakespeare
“Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me from mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom.”
The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2
William Shakespeare
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